Insects serve as pests and disease vectors. For example, the Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti mosquito not only annoys humans and livestock by biting but also spreads malaria and Dengue fever. Similarly, tsetse flies are biological vectors of trypanosomes, which cause human sleeping sickness and animal trypanosomiasis. Triatominae (kissing bugs) spread Chagas disease.
Locating, measuring, and interacting with such swarms in real time as they form has been extremely difficult on the field. Reliable tracking of individual pests unobtrusively as they traverse the home, village or the wild has not been demonstrated. Trap-less counting and characterization of pest populations around humans has not been achieved.
Mosquito control is still an unsolved problem in many developing countries. Malaria is epidemic in many places, including sub-Saharan Africa where the majority of the Earth's malaria fatalities occur. Generic control measures rely on toxic chemical and biological agents, while repellents in conjunction with mosquito nets provide additional defense. While these are efficient, they also pose direct danger and serious discomfort to users, albeit small when compared to the grave dangers of malaria. Traditional measures seem to be approaching their peak efficiency in practice, while the malaria epidemic is still ongoing.
As stated above, various approaches employ toxic materials. For example, Tillotson et al. (US Patent application Publication 2010/0286803) describes a system for dispensing fluid (such as insect repellant) in response to a sensed property such as an ambient sound (e.g., known signatures of insect wing beat frequencies and their harmonics). These are proximity sensors that determine that an insect is close enough to warrant fluid dispensing when the amplitude of the wing beat frequency exceeds some threshold value over the background noise.